1. Field
Embodiments of the invention relate to performing storage operations in a virtual environment and, in particular, to backing up data of one or more virtual machines.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many companies take advantage of virtualization solutions to consolidate several specialized physical servers and workstations into fewer servers running virtual machines. Each virtual machine can be configured with its own set of virtual hardware (e.g., processor, memory, ports, and the like) such that specialized services that each of the previous physical machines performed can be run in their native operating system. In particular, a virtualization layer, or hypervisor, allocates the computing resources of one or more host servers to one or more virtual machines and further provides for isolation between such virtual machines. In such a manner, the virtual machine is a representation of a physical machine by software.
Associated with each virtual machine is at least one virtual machine disk that is located in one or more files on a datastore. The virtual machine disk can be copied, moved, archived or the like. For instance, certain vendors offer solutions that operate from inside the guest operating system of a virtual machine to back up the virtual machine disk(s). This approach, however, has significant drawbacks in that such backup copies, being performed from within the guest operating system, cannot capture a backup of the entire virtual machine. Moreover, other backup solutions require a full copy of the virtual machine disk to a backup proxy device each time a backup is to be performed.